The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed

by Joseph Duncan

  But he was wrong.

  I am no longer an Eternal.

  Strong, yes. Long lived, for certain. But this new body is nowhere near as invincible as my original form. Even though Lukas absorbed much of my power when he devoured my Living Blood, this body—his body-- is not quite as indestructible as my previous one had been. The old me. The real me.

  I will die.

  Someday.

  Not, I think, for a very long time. But I will die.

  We buried Sam on the mountain beside Miriam, not far from the remains of my lost mortal loved ones. He was not so old that his body flew immediately to dust. Only the truly ancient do that. What we buried looked like an Egyptian mummy, flesh black and shriveled to the bones, limbs drawn insect-like to his chest. Nora removed his vampire fangs should some mortal hunter stumble across his grave, as we did to Miranda, and then we retired to the room I had rented in town.

  The sun was peeking over the horizon by then, making the snow twinkle like faerie dust. The streets were full of automobiles farting white puffs of carbon dioxide. Nora, stoic as always, took the suite next door to mine. She did not comment on the death of her fledgling, though I could tell that her heart was heavy with her loss. She departed that evening with her surviving companion, the bookseller John Worthy. John shook my hand, paid his respects to Zenzele, then went down to pull their car around. Nora kissed me chastely on the cheek, telling me not to be too hard on myself.

  “Can you see the shame that’s inscribed on my heart?” I asked.

  “I do not have to read your mind,” she replied, smiling at me sympathetically. She turned to Zenzele and Apollonius then. They had roomed with me that day. They stood now in the corridor to see her off, Zenzele in a deep red khanga and beaded headdress, Paulo in white linen. “Look after him, mother, Paulo. You know how he likes to wallow in guilt.”

  Zenzele inclined her head in acknowledgment while Paulo smirked and looked sidelong at me.

  It had already been decided that the three of us-- Zenzele, Paulo and I—were going to Karpathos, and that I was to live there with Paulo’s family until this dangerous melancholy passed.

  If it passed.

  “Yes, we know how he gets,” Zenzele said.

  “We’ll keep him out of trouble,” Paulo chipped in.

  I didn’t know whether to feel grateful or insulted. They were treating me like a senile old fool. But I didn’t object. They were much too forgiving, and I was just selfish enough to allow it.

  Nora glanced uneasily at Zenzele, then said in a low rush, “It is him, mother. I swear. I looked deep into his soul. Somehow his essence was passed through the Blood.” She glanced at me apologetically, then turned and hurried away.

  Justus, at least, could be restored.

  I had looked after him that morning in my room, tending to his injuries as Agnes fretted and Zenzele sat and stared at me with thinly concealed suspicion. “Do not worry, my friend,” I comforted him. “I can make you whole again. I will restore your sight. I promise you.” There is nothing more powerful than the blood of a true immortal, and if my blood was no longer powerful enough to do the trick, I had Zenzele and Agnes to help me with that.

  Justus chuckled, taking his mutilation in stride. “When it comes to you, Gyozo, I always seem to come out a little worse for wear. Perhaps that is my penance for loving you.” He caressed my face with his fingertips, then folded his hands on his chest. “Do what you will. I trust you.”

  “You have foreseen it?” I asked. I could not imagine how he could trust me after all I had done.

  He shook his head, a faint smile quirking his lips. “The visions are gone,” he said. “I am as blind to the future as I am to your new face. It is… a great relief.”

  “Your visions, or my new face?” I asked, leaning down and kissing his brow.

  “Both,” he teased me.

  “Perhaps, when we have restored your sight, your Future Sight will be restored to you as well,” I said.

  “I hope not,” Justus said. “Life becomes an exercise in tedium when you always know what happens next. Every moment of every day, laid out for you beforehand. It is maddening.”

  I searched his maimed face for the truth of it. He meant what he was saying, though it was hard to be certain without seeing his eyes. They were just two empty sockets now staring back at me. But he was still beautiful.

  “I will make you whole again,” I promised.

  After Nora departed, Zenzele and I went out to hunt. The air was cold and moist, the clouds like sodden laundry piled in the sky. I tried to make conversation as we skipped along the rooftops but my soulmate was uncharacteristically silent.

  “You do not trust that I am still me,” I finally said. “You look at me and see a stranger’s face, a stranger’s form. But I am still me. The soul is the same.”

  She continued on for a little while without speaking, then finally she stopped. “It is difficult,” she said. She stood at the edge of the roof, her back to me. Behind her, red lights blinked steadily on a metal tower, like a heartbeat. “I hear your voice and it is the same, but the lips that speak the words are not the lips that I remember.”

  “Which is more important?” I asked. “The words or the lips?”

  She did not answer, just fetched a sigh and continued on.

  I was forlorn.

  We found the house I had pointed out to Lukas earlier, the one with the corpse buried in the back yard. It was a two-story dwelling in the German style, with half-timbered walls and small shuttered windows. The house had fallen into disrepair, its roof slumped, windows cataract with grime. We slipped in through the back door, passed through a small kitchen that smelled of rotten food and mouse urine, and made our way silently to the stairs. There were bloodstains at the foot of the stairs, and several smaller splashes on the risers near the bottom. They had been scrubbed thoroughly with bleach many years before, would be invisible to mortal eyes, but they were quite distinct to our enhanced vampire senses. It was not hard to imagine how the murder was committed.

  Upstairs, snoring loudly in his bed, was a grossly obese man of late middle age. He was so large his body took up more than half the saggy mattress. The room smelled of unwashed flesh and corruption. In the corner on a dresser, a pornographic movie played unheeded on a small color television. A pair of men in leather hoods copulating with a terribly young-looking female. There were chains and whips and grotesque sexual devices. The man had fallen asleep while watching, both hands stuffed in his filthy boxer shorts.

  Lips curled in distaste, Zenzele slipped around to the opposite side of the bed. She crouched over the man, fingers poised to strike. The light of the television jittered over her smooth, dark skin. On the wall behind her: framed photos of a young married couple, decades old and faded now. The man, slimmer, almost handsome, grinning alongside the curly headed woman he would someday push down the stairs.

  “Rise, murderer!” I cried.

  The mortal’s eyelids flew up in surprise. “Was--?” he snorted. He stared at me in bewilderment, mouth agape, eyes bulging. An instant later, Zenzele snatched those eyes neatly from their sockets.

  I was at his throat before he could scream.

  Before we left I picked up his cigarettes. They were sitting on his bedside table next to an overflowing ashtray and a half-empty bottle of personal lubricant. Zenzele watched with grim approval as I took out a cigarette, lit it with a match, puffed the cherry bright and hot and then dropped it onto the blanket beside the dead man’s body. His house was not near enough to his neighbor’s homes to pose them any danger.

  We returned to the hotel and gently pressed the purloined eyes into Justus’s eye sockets.

  “Will this really work?” Agnes asked, anxiously observing the procedure.

  “If our luck is good,” I said.

  I gestured to Zenzele. I did not trust my hybrid blood to do the trick. She looked at me strangely and then bit into her wrist. Several drops of her Eternal blood spattered down o
nto his eyes. I rubbed her blood into his new eyes with the pads of my thumbs and prayed to my ancestors. After a few moments, the irises took on a jewel-like gleam. The pupils twitched and contracted. Justus groaned as the Living Blood joined the severed optic nerves, and then he blinked around at us.

  “Did it work?” I asked. “Can you see again?”

  “Dimly,” he said, sitting up in the bed. “As through smoked glass. But it is growing clearer by the moment.” He peered around the room, smiling appreciatively, and then he looked at me. He reached out and cupped my cheek. “Gyozo! You look so strange!”

  I took his hand and squeezed it in mine. “It does not matter. I’m glad you are whole. You’ve suffered too greatly on my behalf.” I looked at Agnes. “Both of you.”

  “To live is to suffer,” Justus said. “The only choice we have is whether to forgive those who’ve wounded us or not.”

  “And do you forgive me?” I asked. “Once more?”

  “Of course, I do,” Justus said without hesitation.

  Paulo returned then, looking flushed and animated. He had fed. Good. We waved him over to the bed to look at Justus’s new eyes.

  “They’re two different colors,” he observed.

  “They are!” I said in surprise. “Green and brown. I didn’t notice that before.”

  Justus and Agnes departed for Engel Abbey the following night, promising to visit us in Karpathos. And I had a feeling he meant to keep that promise. He was unusually exuberant. His Future Sight still had not returned, even with the new eyes. “Every moment is a revelation!” he exclaimed.

  He embraced Apollonius on the street outside the hotel.

  “Look after my Gyozo,” he said to his brother. “You know how he gets.”

  Paulo laughed.

  Agnes slid gracefully into the car they had hired to take them home. She was really quite lovely with her flowing white hair and white voluminous garments. Justus nodded to Zenzele, then swept me into his arms, whispering ardently in my ear, “Would that we were alone together for a few days, Gyozo. We would not leave the bed!”

  I kissed him, closing my eyes and relishing the taste of his lips, the feel of his body pressed to mine. But Zenzele was with me again. He knew the rule!

  Rules be damned, he pinched my arse and then retreated into the limo, new eyes twinkling gleefully. The shiny black vehicle rolled away, leaving a faint cloud of exhaust hanging in the air.

  It had begun to snow again, the sky lowering and starless.

  “I don’t know about you two,” Apollonius said, after the car had turned from sight, “but I’m famished. You should feed tonight if you still plan to come with me. Karpathos is a beautiful island but there’s not much of a criminal element.”

  And so we did, the three of us.

  There was not much of a criminal element in Bad Wildbach either, but we managed to sniff out a villain or two.

  2

  Karpathos was the second largest island of the Dodecanese. Dodecanese literally meant “twelve islands”. The Twelve Islands were surrounded by approximately 150 smaller islands, of which 26 were inhabited. The Dodecanese had been inhabited since prehistoric times. Even the smallest of the populated islands boasted dozens of Byzantine churches and medieval castles. But there were also shopping centers and airports, cellphone towers and satellite TV. All the modern amenities.

  Paulo and his family had resided on Karpathos for almost two hundred years. It was the perfect place to house a coven of vampires. Remote and relatively safe, the only real drawback was the tiny population with whom they shared the island. Because there were so few mortals, Paulo and his clan were forced to subsist on the blood of animals—swine mostly, from a local slaughterhouse. The only time the striges of Karpathos could feed on mortal blood was during the Panagias, the island’s most famous religious festival, when tourists and expatriates flocked to the island from all over the world. During the Panagias, the Nikos Family could hunt as proper vampires do, preying on the wicked who came to enjoy of the festival.

  But the Panagias was six months away. Karpathos would be all but deserted when we arrived. There were only six thousand permanent residents, the population of a small town, and that spread across three hundred square kilometers, but I was looking forward to the solitude. I had a lot to think about.

  The boat we hired to carry us to Karpathos was called the Volada. I spent most of the voyage standing on the deck, watching the dark waters of the Carpathian Sea glide sedately by as we wound our way through the islands.

  Apollonius-- my beloved Paulo— had not let me out of his sight since we departed Bad Wildbach. Though we spoke freely as we had always done, I could sometimes feel his eyes on me. In fact, I could feel them boring into the back of my skull right now, as if he wished to climb inside my head and see for himself if I was still truly me. Zenzele stood at the rails beside me, her hand curled over mine, our fingers intertwined. She had hardly spoken since my resurrection.

  “Do you remember when we went to see the Colossus, Paulo?” I asked.

  “Father?” Paulo said, rising from his deck chair and joining us at the rail. He stood on my left, opposite Zenzele.

  “The Colossus of Rhodes,” I said, smiling at him.

  I saw him flinch back from that stranger’s smile. It saddened me a little… but only a little. It was still too exciting, too novel, to have this new body to feel very sad about the destruction of the original.

  I was no longer an Eternal.

  I could die now. Not tonight certainly. Not even very soon. But I was no longer the indestructible Gon, and my new vulnerability added a strange piquancy to my experiences, one they had never held for me before. Life, I found, was far more precious when you were allotted a certain measure and then no more. I could-- I would-- die someday. Perhaps that was why Zenzele clung so jealously to me. She was still a true immortal. Someday I would be gone, dead and gone, and then she would be the oldest living vampire.

  How much dearer a thing becomes when you can lose it at any moment!

  I pretended that I did not notice Paulo’s discomfort. I had offered to Share with him, prove to him that I was still his maker, that Lukas’s personality had been subsumed by my own, but the boy had refused.

  On the surface, he had accepted Nora’s assurances that I was truly myself, that some miracle had occurred and my spirit had shifted into the body of my destroyer, but I could see that some doubt still lingered in his mind. Especially when he looked on my face and saw not his father but some strange hybrid of the two, part Lukas and part Gon.

  I gestured to a nearby island. The lights of Rhodes, largest of the Dodecanese, glimmered on the black mirror of the sea. Once, the Colossus of Rhodes, a ten-story statue of the titan Helios, stood there at the entrance of the Mandraki harbor. It was nearly one hundred feet tall in its day, a marvel of engineering, and one of the tallest statues in the ancient world. In 226 BC, an earthquake destroyed it, breaking it off at the knees. It had toppled back onto the island. Paulo and I had gone to see the Colossus, but only after it fell.

  “I regret that I didn’t see the Colossus while it stood,” I said. “It truly was a wonder of the ancient world. I thought it would stand forever, or at least a little longer than it actually did. I was always putting it off, thinking there was plenty of time to go see it. I’m sure you remember. There was always something else to do, other concerns to occupy my time—most of them trifling things. I’m sure they seemed important at the time, but now I only remember that I did not see the Colossus until the earthquake had cut him off at the knees.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Paulo said.

  “Even then we put it off. And then we heard that the caliph Muawiyah meant to conquer Rhodes, so we sailed to see the Colossus before it was cast down and sold to the merchants.”

  “Even in ruins, it was a marvel,” Paulo said.

  “You could not wrap your arms around its finger,” I said, smiling at the memory.

  “I remember.”
/>   “For fifty years, it stood.”

  “And then it lay for eight hundred more,” Paulo said. “But we finally went to see it.”

  “Yes, but it was not the same. I wish I could have seen it standing over the harbor. Seen it in its glory. Seen the Wonder, not the Ruin.”

  “You spoke of purchasing it yourself. Paying for its restoration.”

  “Yes, but then the Arabs invaded and we were forced to flee the city.”

  “But not before killing Muawiyah’s general.”

  I laughed. “We fed well upon the caliph’s soldiers that night. His general soiled his trousers when I snatched him from his steed. Did I ever tell you that? I flew with him to the rooftops, meaning to feed on him at my leisure, but the stench of his excrement spoiled my appetite.”

  I thought Zenzele would laugh at that—she liked a good poop joke-- but she stood impassively beside me, staring out into the dark.

  “I remember,” Paulo said, smiling. He looked out thoughtfully on the lights of Rhodes, then turned to me. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Was I being too subtle?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Paulo said, and he looked back at Rhodes. After a moment, he laughed.

  We stood and listened to the waves splash against the hull of the boat as the island receded into the darkness. To the south, Karpathos rose from the gentle curve of the horizon as if emerging, wet and glistening, from the sea.

  3

  The Volada glided smoothly into the anchorage of Pigadia, the main village of the island of Karpathos. Fatima, Paulo’s wife, was waiting for us by the docks, leaning against a maroon sports car with tinted windows. Her glossy black hair rippled languidly in the breeze as if she were floating underwater, an almond-skinned mermaid. Fatima was dressed that evening in flared white trousers and a flower-print blouse. Though it was full dark, she was also wearing a pair of round hippy-style sunglasses.

  Sunglasses at night: one sure way to spot a vampire.